We would like to encourage people from every place in the world to join our community here and participate in the development of Ubuntu. We have started experimenting with posts in Spanish, and we have discussed a few ideas of how we could make this work for other languages. So here’s my proposal:

Every language is welcome in this site.

We encourage discussions in new languages.

If you want to post in a language that’s not English, add a tag with the full name of the language. For example, español.

If you are the first posting in a language, start by requesting that tag to be created. Make the request in the Site Feedback category of this hub.

Moving to the Site Feedback category, so it has higher visibility with the Admins and Mods. I think there needs to be a bit of input from them, too.

There is currently no policy in the Terms of Service nor the FAQ-Guidelines requiring english-only posting. As with most things Ubuntu, that means it’s permitted as long as it doesn’t violate the Code of Conduct.

My advice: Start requesting the language tags that you want immediately, and try a few posts in that language.

Problem: It’s difficult to moderate in a different language, which is why the other forums generally won’t.

Each post must be viewed through Google Translate, a laborious process.

After translation, the foreign moderator still won’t recognize many cultural and local references that violate the Ubuntu Code of Conduct.

There are a few possible solutions, which are pretty obvious (multi-lingual moderators, etc) but also add to the admin burden,

Personally, I’m willing to give multi-language a try…with the obvious big caveat that communities must self-police and be willing to flag - everybody should feel welcome and listened to (except bullies, trolls, vandals). However, that’s my personal opinion - a quorum of Mods can differ, or the admins may publish a policy.

And by “give multi-language a try”, I mean that it’s an experiment. Some experiments work out well, some do not.